False Economy - Alan Beattie [29]
The process of artificial urbanization is hard to reverse. Even attempting to do so in countries in Africa often required the intervention of an outside body with an unusual amount of influence, such as the IMF. (In any case, in practice the process had often gone so far by then that attempts to level the playing field between town and country had little effect.) Even when it is obvious to any reasonably well-informed observer with eyes in his head that cities have been privileged way beyond the economic justification for them, they have by then often created a self-reinforcing political imperative. In the kind of countries where errors like this are often made, where governments are unstable, nervous, and subject to direct action, it is often easy for a city—and, critically, the capital city—to punch well above its political weight.
There is a particular risk to ignoring the mood of the capital that a trio of monarchs—Charles I of England, Louis XVI of France, and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia—learned to their cost and paid for with their heads. When it comes to exerting political power, those within rioting distance of the royal palace have a better means of making their grievances known than do equally disgruntled peasants muttering into their gruel as they go about their miserable rural lives, hundreds of miles from the capital.
In a strong democracy like modern-day France—and, to a lesser extent, in a strong autocracy like China—it makes litde difference where any malcontents live. Everyone has the same vote, or the same impotence in the face of the overweening state. By contrast, in regimes liable to violent overthrow or susceptible to direct political pressure, it can make a great deal of difference. In countries with a history of stable democracy, an average of 23 percent of the urban population lives in the central city; in unstable dictatorships with a history of coups and revolutions, the figure is 37 percent. And once cities manage to exact disproportionate tribute from the rest of the country, the trend can become self-reinforcing. The incentive for rural flight toward the city increases, and so does the political imperative to keep the urbanites happy.
It was through anticipating and preempting these problems that the founding fathers of the United States made Washington, D.C., what it is. When the United States was created, the states were suspicious of one another and wary of handing over power to a federal government, fearing that placing the capital city within one of their number would give that state undue influence. So Washington was deliberately created to be a small and deracinated capital in a "federal district," not a state. This became a familiar tactic in the modern world, as the dullness and remoteness of Canberra, Wellington, and Ottawa testify.
Political inertia, and entrenched reluctance to change the U.S. Constitution without an extremely good reason, have kept it that way ever since. In modern Washington, there is plenty of blatantly open political favoritism going on, particularly the ludicrous federal spending commitments that go under the pleasing nickname "pork." But the pork is not distributed to Washingtonians. The citizens of the District of Columbia have no senators, and only a nonvoting member of the House of Representatives. Remarkably, the Republican Party sometimes does not bother even standing a candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., on the grounds that it is such a solidly Democratic city that Republicans would be wasting their time and money, and it is so small it hardly matters who runs it. (Most local Republicans, in any case, live in suburbs in the surrounding states, Maryland and Virginia.)
The American War of Independence began on the principle of "No taxation without representation."